Finder not restoring open windows and tabs on restart

As some followers of Best-mac-tips may recall, I’ve recommended XtraFinder on numerous occasions. I continue to use it, and prefer it over the more expensive TotalFinder.

At some point—perhaps after upgrading to Yosemite, but I am not exactly sure when—Finder stopped restoring its open windows and tabs are a system restart. I thought perhaps XtraFinder was at fault, but even with that deactivated, the same issue occurred. From what I recall, in older versions of OS X there was a preference in Finder that was related to having it restore open windows after a system restart. I am guessing that since tabs were introduced to Finder, that option was removed. But perhaps it’s possible for that option to be set to FALSE and now there’s no way to set it to TRUE from within the OS X Gui.

What I ended up doing was issuing the following command in Terminal:

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defaults write com.apple.finder NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows-booltrue

That will set the above-mentioned option to TRUE. After this my Finder has resumed restoring open tabs and windows after a system restart (and even after a forced restart of the Finder app). This seems to be working with and without XtraFinder managing the Tabs in Finder.

That is the first thing I would suggest trying. Open a Finder window, and bring up multiple tabs. Then restart your system to see if the tabs are restored. If you use XtraFinder you can just go to its Tools menu, and click “Restart Finder”. This saves having to wait for your whole system to shut-down and each time you test Finder for this issue.

Something else I have seen recommended is this. I didn’t need to do it, but it may help in some situations.

Delete the following file:

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~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.finder.savedState

To locate that file, copy the following folder path:

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~/Library/Saved Application State/

Then bring up Finder, and hit ⇧⌘-G. The “Go to the folder” dialogue will appear. Now hit Control-V to paste in the file path you copied. Hit Enter, and you will now be looking at that folder. Now locate the com.apple.finder.savedState file. Delete that file.

After deleting that file, restart your system. There’s not harm in deleting that file. It is simply a file OS X creates for storing the state info about Finder. If the file is gone, OS X will simply create it again. You are deleting it to force OS X to recreate it, just in case it has some kind of corruption that is affecting whether Finder restores windows/tabs after a restart.